THE DESIGN OF A NEW FRONTAL CODE FOR SOLVING SPARSE, UNSYMMETRIC SYSTEMS

We describe the design, implementation, and performance of a frontal c ode for the solution of large, sparse, unsymmetric systems of linear e quations. The resulting software package, MA42, is included in Release 11 of the Harwell Subroutine Library and is intended to supersede the earlier MA32 package. We discuss in detail the extensive use of highe r-level BLAS kernels within MA42 and illustrate the performance on a r ange of practical problems on a GRAY Y-MP, an IBM 3090, and an IBM RIS C System/6000. We examine extending the frontal solution scheme to use multiple fronts to allow MA42 to be run in parallel. We indicate some directions for future development.